Alexei Navalny's mother says she's being "blackmailed" over son's body

The mother of Alexei Navalny, a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin, who died in a Russian prison last week has said that she has seen her son's body, but is being "blackmailed" by Russian authorities who want a secret burial.

Lyudmila Navalnaya spoke in a video, seen by Noveritas, in Russian, saying that she was taken to the morgue by a Russian investigator known as Voropayev, and saw the body, as well as medical and legal documents detailing the cause of death.

Navalnaya claims that means that: "according to the law, they should have given me Alexei's body immediately". However, they haven't done so. She claims the Russia authorities are "blackmailing" her about "where, when, and how Alexei should be buried".

In the video address, which can be watched below in Russia, she said: "They secretly took me to the morgue, where they showed Alexei. The investigators claim that they know the cause of death, they have ready medical and legal documents that I saw, and the medical certificate of death I signed.

According to the law, they should have given me Alexei's body immediately. But they haven't done it until now. Instead they are blackmailing me, putting conditions on me, where when and how Alexei should be buried. It's illegal.

They want it done secretly, without a farewell. They want to bring me to the outskirts of the cemetery to a fresh grave and say, 'This is where your son lies.' I do not agree to this. Investigator Voropayev openly told me: Time is not working for you. The corpse is decomposing."

Russian authorities say that Navalny took ill following a walk, and collapsed and died. He had "almost immediately lost consciousness", the prison service said in a press release, adding that an emergency medical team had immediately been called and tried to resuscitate him but without success.

This came a couple of months after he was moved to a notorious arctic penal colony, thousands of miles to the north-east of Moscow in Siberia. He was initially imprisoned in 2021, and Western laboratories say he had also been poisoned with a nerve agent in 2020, but survived.

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